16 Conclusions from Chelsea 1-1 Arsenal: Caicedo, Chalobah, cards and carelessness | OneFootball

Chelsea and Arsenal put on a display of wonderful Barclays in a game that could only be described as a Proper London Derby in which it rained tackles, fouls, cards, niggle and occasionally football.

The end result was 10-man Chelsea holding on for a point and a frustrated, not-at-their best Arsenal holding on to their five-point lead at the top of the table.

Who’s happy with that outcome? Both? Neither? We’re miserable sods so would prefer the latter. Was it a great game? No. Did we enjoy it? Thoroughly.

1. Now that was Barclays heritage. Where exactly everything stands after a high-tempo, high-niggle, occasional-football encounter between the teams who started and ended the day first and third in the league we’re not so sure.

It was definitely a decent result for Manchester City, still just about in there fighting despite themselves. And a handy result for those of us for whom a proper title race that lasts longer than the Christmas turkey would be decidedly useful.

Not quite so sure what either of the teams involved will make of it. The faces at full-time suggested Arsenal the more miffed and the more two-points-dropped participant after a result that both teams would probably have taken at certain points in the day but definitely not at others.

2. Preserving the status quo at the top and ticking off one of the tougher games on the way to what remains a very probable league title means Arsenal, some way short of their best on the day, absolutely shouldn’t be too gloomy. But a team on their current run of form would expect to beat pretty much anyone when given a one-man advantage for almost an hour, and the failure to ever really grasp the kind of control of proceedings Arsenal usually manage easily enough against 11 will niggle.

3. Chelsea, on the other hand, will know that to really light a fire under the title race they probably needed to end the day closer to Arsenal than they started it. But in the circumstances, that has to go down as a decent point in the end.

The frustration will be that they were still able to match Arsenal as well as they did a man down for so long; it makes it almost impossible not to ponder what might have been had they kept it 11 v 11. But they’ve also shown something to themselves and everyone else here. They are absolutely in this title race and well capable of going toe-to-toe with what is on current available evidence the best football team in Europe.

4. That Chelsea were able to cope so admirably with the uphill task Moises Caicedo so recklessly and unnecessarily left them facing was very much a team effort, but there was one individual to the fore.

By the end of the afternoon Reece James appeared to be playing right-back, right centre-back and defensive midfield, and doing a pretty tidy job of all three all at the same time. It was to Chelsea’s great collective credit that at no point did they ever really look like they were a man down.

But James’ everything everywhere all at once performance was a huge factor. It remains one of the great frustrations, for Chelsea and England, that all estimations of just how frighteningly good a player he is require the qualifier ‘when fit’. An exceptional performance and, for all the good work done by plenty of others, it’s hard to see how Chelsea could probably have emerged from today’s specific set of circumstances with a point to show for it had James not been there.

5. Of course, another plausible reason why Chelsea were able to cope so readily with being down to 10 men is that they get plenty of practice. This was their sixth red card of the season, and fourth in the Premier League.

It’s easy to be flippant about it, but these are damaging numbers for a side that finds itself on the cusp of a genuine title challenge but is making life harder than it needs to be at an alarming rate.

The all-time Premier League record of nine red cards in a season – jointly held by Sunderland and QPR sides who were not in the title race of either 2009/10 or 2011/12 – is well within range for a team currently seeing players given their marching orders at a rate of one ever 3.25 games.

6. Much of the build-up for this one had the mere bagatelle of the title race playing second fiddle to the far more important title of Best Midfielder In The Premier League. Rice v Caicedo was the real quiz here.

And Caicedo was definitely ahead on points, with Chelsea enjoying the better of the opening half-hour, until he settled the contest with a wildly unnecessary and indisputably dangerous lunge at Mikel Merino.

It wasn’t just the planting of his studs on the Arsenal man’s ankle that did for Caicedo, with his jump into the tackle adding to the overall reckless, out-of-control quality of the challenge.

It might not have been the day’s most stupidly avoidable red card – Lucas Paqueta having sewn that particular title up with a grand flourish an hour or so earlier at the London Stadium – but it was a wild misjudgement from a player whose control has been so integral to Chelsea’s push this season.

He owes his team-mates one here that it didn’t prove far more costly. Except in the Rice v Caicedo heavyweight title clash, which Rice basically won by default.

7. While we do strive not to get rattled by interminable VAR delays that nevertheless deliver the correct outcome, we couldn’t help it here. That just all really didn’t need to take that long, with the cheap theatre of VAR once again granted primacy over all other considerations.

The fact Caicedo’s tackle left both perpetrator and victim writhing around in pain meant a treatment delay was inevitable.

A sensible sport would have used that unavoidable delay in proceedings to get the VAR bits sorted. But our sport is not a sensible sport, so we didn’t have that. Instead we all saw the replays and all knew what was eventually going to happen one way or the other.

By the time Caicedo was in any state to be shown a yellow card by the referee we all knew he was going to be off to the screen to change that decision to red.

8. Even at that relatively early stage of the game, it had long felt inevitable that this game would not conclude as an 11 v 11 affair. Or at the very least that it wouldn’t remain 11 v 11 until the final whistle without an enormously controversial reprieve for someone taking a risk while perched precariously upon The Disciplinary Tightrope after a flurry of early bookings about which Anthony Taylor had little real choice.

This was feisty one from the first whistle, with the yellow that became red shown to Caicedo already the fifth card of the afternoon and coming only moments after Marc Cucurella had himself been perhaps a touch fortunate after his 11th-minute booking (already the second of the game) not to receive another caution for a classic ‘first yellow but not quite a second’ offence that kind of shouldn’t really exist but that we all know does and understand why.

9. The fear at that point was that this might be one of those early red cards in a big game that Ruin The Game as a Spectacle. We’ve said before and will say again: that is nothing for the referee to be concerned about. Had indeed the spectacle been ruined, it would have been Caicedo and nobody else at fault.

But happily, that also didn’t really happen. Perhaps as a function of the game already operating at such high background levels of niggle and rattle with players already at each other that this was the spectacle.

The first half kept our attention throughout. But we can’t say we remember a vast amount of football breaking out.

10. The second half was, from that perspective, a bit better. And happily with absolutely no discernible reduction in the rattle and niggle.

The second period began with Chelsea fans trying to goad Taylor into a ‘levelling things up’ red card that, in fairness, always looked distinctly possible given the number and position of Arsenal players on yellow cards by this point.

11. Piero Hincapie was the target for Chelsea’s attempts to get the game back to 10 v 10, and that seemed as good a choice as any because he was having a difficult day, at one getting himself in such a pickle under pressure from Joao Pedro that he found himself described in perfectly ludicrous Peter Drury fashion as ‘having his Ecuadorian heart in his Ecuadorian mouth’.

The sheer baffling repetitive specificity can only lead us to conclude that there exist out there some Premier League footballers who possess body parts of differing nationality. Who? Where? Why? We demand to be told.

12. Mikel Arteta sensed this might be what the second half had in store, concluding at half-time that continuing with three of his back four and his most defensively minded midfielder on bookings in this kind of game was a risk too far.

Off came Riccardio Calafiori, on came Myles Lewis-Skelly. And nine minutes later, into the book he also went. It was just that kind of game.

It may have been some way short of the most gratuitously violent Premier League draw at Stamford Bridge featuring a visitor from North London, but it still produced 25 fouls at a near-even split to go with a seasonally appropriate smattering of cards.

13. By the time Lewis-Skelly had collected the fifth of Arsenal’s six bookings, Chelsea had done the very best thing for the game As A Spectacle by taking an unlikely lead. Trevoh Chalobah, after scoring against Manchester United earlier in the season, is marking himself out as a 10-man specialist and his near-post little eyebrows of a header from a James – of course it was James – corner was about as good an example of Arsenal being Arsenaled as you could wish to see.

Arsenal have scored that goal multiple times already this season, but this time got themselves in a defensive tangle. Chalobah did the rest and a football match duly broke out between all the other good stuff as Arsenal were forced to chase the game.

14. They were behind for only 10 minutes as Bukayo Saka – who otherwise endured a frustrating and wayward time – did wonderfully well to create the chance to dig out a cross for Mikel Merino to continue his inexorable journey towards becoming the world’s greatest centre-forward.

15. But Arsenal never really built on it. Never did it quite have that sense of a winner feeling like the inevitable order of events that it often these days can feel with this side.

They just weren’t quite there, the final ball too often lacking or – and this could yet prove a big moment when the season’s final story comes to be written – when that final ball was there in stoppage Viktor Gyokeres found his big, decisive, ‘that’s why they bought him’ moment stolen away from him by Jurrien Timber unhelpfully getting his own head to the ball from a far worse position.

That could have been the one.

16. Yet even then any attempt from Gyokeres would have needed to find a way past Robert Sanchez, who had one of his very best games in goal for Chelsea. He had no hope with the goal, and made two similar big saves – one in each half – in which he managed to change direction smartly and get down low to get a strong hand to fizzing efforts.

The second of those required him to also bounce up quickly and bravely to pounce on the loose ball before the onrushing Gyokeres, who collected Arsenal’s sixth yellow of the game for his troubles, as Sanchez preserved a hard-earned and well-deserved point for a Chelsea team with a bit more about them than seemed likely when they were clowning against Sunderland only a few weeks ago.